Back with a Vengeance! – Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow 2 Review

So many games, so little time. And when you are pressed by other things, it’s always a pain to put all your priorities in the right order. Nonetheless, I finally managed to give a sneak peek to the latest Konami work, the long-awaited Castlevania Lord of Shadow 2. This game it’s the 3rd chapter of the saga rebooted by the excellent Mercury Steam Spanish group.
As far as they say, this should be the last chapter as well but for what I’ve seen so far, it looks like it will be the most controversial for sure.

The game starts with an intro you might have seen before, depicting Gabriel Belmont’s castle under heavy siege. As you know, Gabriel has been turned into Dracula, and the Brotherhood of Light is more than determined to end his demonic existence.
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In reality, the real game starts in a slightly different way, where Gabriel/Dracula fights against a few knights inside the throne room. This fight actually serves as a tutorial, so after having defeated your first enemies you can progress with an exploration phase which will end with your first boss fight.
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As you can see, this really is a combined boss fight, in which you have to defeat a Brotherhood Paladin while climbing and crawling over a Titan, avoiding its deadly blows.
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It is at this point that the story gets …. interesting. Unfortunately, I do believe that progressing in my review would become a major SPOILER unless you have played the first game of the series well beyond the ending credits. If you don’t know what I mean you should take a closer look at my unboxing article, and closely examine how some of the action figures look…

What I can say for the moment is that I like how the game behave after the introduction of the third dimension, even though I’m not sure if I like how the game looks. Since Gabriel Belmont has now been turned into a vampire, Mercury Steam decided to shift the color palette to red-blooded themes, but they look oversaturated to me. In addition, the new scenarios introduced here remind me more of a Legacy of Kain type of game rather than a Castlevania one. Only time will tell if we can talk about a new masterpiece or if Konami turned Castlevania into an action “shooter” (slasher) the same way Capcom did with Resident Evil saga when they published RE5. 🙁